SEBI Directs NSE to Fix Individual Responsibilities for Trading Disruption

By – Ashwathy Nair

Sebi issues revised guidelines for moving to DR sites.
The NSE submitted its detailed RCA to the technical advisory committee of Sebi.
NSE maintains an NDR site nearby at Kurla along with a DR site in Chennai.

On Monday, the management of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) has been directed by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) to fix individual responsibilities along with describing that, why it was unsuccessful in shifting operations to the (DR) disaster recovery site throughout the 24th February trading outage. Three weeks are granted to the exchange in order to complete the exercise.

Revised guidelines were also issued by Sebi for moving to DR sites. “Starting in July 2021, an undisclosed live trading session shall be conducted from the Disaster Recovery platform of market infrastructure institutions (MIIs) with a small scales of 45 minutes from Sebi before the starting of the trade session,” it said.

On the other hand, a detailed root cause analysis (RCA) has been submitted by the NSE to the technical advisory committee of Sebi. In a press statement, NSE stated that “After trading halt on the National Stock Exchange, it is considered as all the available alternatives on hand, consisting of the invocation of DR, in order to decide on the course of action that would be bringing up the market at the earliest with minimum interruption to market participants, and post evaluation, a decision was made to get the systems up to speed at the primary location. In line with Sebi regulations, the NSE regularly tests its DR readiness, wherein quarterly drills are being conducted along with those live trading sessions from the DR site are conducted twice a year.”

In Mumbai’s BKC, NSE has a primary data centre at its headquarters. A near-disaster recovery (NDR) is also maintaining the site neighbouring at Kurla as well as a disaster recovery (DR) site in Chennai.

The exchange also stated that because of the construction and digging activities among the BKC and Kurla centres, from both of its telecom services providers, there was instability in links. This gave rise to the “unexpected behaviour” of the storage area network (SAN) system. Following this, the risk management system of the National Stock Exchange Clearing, as well as other systems, became unavailable.

In the new guidelines of Sebi, it stated in an event of disruption at “critical systems” that within 30 minutes, the MII will have to proclaim the incident as “disaster”, down from two hours that was allowed earlier. MIIs will be having to take actions in order to restore operations, which consist of Disaster Recovery (DR), within 45 minutes, as opposed to two hours earlier, from the declaration of “disaster”.

The Sebi has also asked MIIs to ensure that any subsystem failure does not affect other vital systems or the securities market’s continued operation.